In the course of producing her book, English professor Diana Fuss
improved her own writing space by replacing a wooden slab desk with a piece of
Art Deco furniture reportedly once owned by a Hollywood mogul

Exploring the influence of environment on writers

Posted December 19, 2005; 01:00 p.m.

by Jennifer Greenstein Altmann

Scholars of great literature often are intrigued by questions that
lie outside the pages of the text. For English professor Diana Fuss, one
question that consumed her was: Where did my favorite writers write?

To find the answers, Fuss wrote “The Sense of an Interior: Four
Writers and the Rooms That Shaped Them,” a study of the living and writing
spaces of four well-known authors. Last month the volume, published by
Routledge, was awarded the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell
Prize as the outstanding book of 2004.

In the book, Fuss describes the smoky ambiance of Sigmund Freud’s
consulting room, the view from Emily Dickinson’s bedroom window, the
inhospitality of Helen Keller’s house and the claustrophobic atmosphere of
Marcel Proust’s bedroom.

In its citation the MLA said, “This richly generative book
expresses and promotes a capaciousness of thought and mind, grounded by Fuss’
finely tuned ‘sixth sense’ and her unmatched capacity to recognize the power of
space in the shaping of the imagination.” Fuss is the third Princeton professor
to win the prize in its 36-year history.

She spent eight years doing research for the book, which included
studying architectural site plans and elevations, finding period photographs
and visiting each location. The work did have its perks: “I got to sit in Emily
Dickinson’s cupola and lie on Freud’s couch — research doesn’t get better than
that,” said Fuss.

The purpose of the book was to understand how the writers
experienced their writing spaces. “When these figures inhabited these domestic
interiors, what were they seeing, hearing, smelling and touching?” Fuss said.
“What was the full sensory experience of inhabiting that space, and how did the
domestic interior shape the acts of introspection that took place there?”

Fuss noted that Proust, who suffered from asthma, lived in a
cork-lined room with heavy drapes to keep out natural light and air. The author
of “Remembrance of Things Past,” a work suffused in sensory experience, “found
it necessary to suspend the senses in order to write about them,” Fuss wrote.

Her findings corrected some dominant misconceptions. Dickinson, for
example, has long been portrayed as a helpless agoraphobic trapped in a dark,
coffin-like room in her father’s house. In fact, Fuss discovered that
Dickinson’s corner bedroom had the best light and the best views of any in the
house.

“It was a room that invested her with scopic power,” Fuss said.
“Far from being confined in her room, she in fact was a kind of family
sentinel.”

Fuss recreated the layout of Freud’s consulting room in meticulous
detail by tracking down a photographer who had taken pictures of the room just
before Freud fled Vienna in 1938. Fuss spent several weeks searching in London
and Vienna for the photographer, Edmund Engelman, who was in his late 80s — and
finally tracked him down living just a few blocks away from her apartment in
Manhattan. Her timing was fortunate as Engelman died shortly after Fuss
contacted him.

“He gave me all kinds of great details about the physical space of
the office and how difficult it was to photograph because it was so cluttered
with antiquities,” Fuss said. “The one space he was unable to photograph from
was the space of Freud’s analytic chair, the seat of power as it were, because
it could not be reproduced or occupied by anyone else.”

Fuss traveled to London’s Freud Museum to examine the analyst’s
furniture — including the infamous ottoman couch on which his patients reclined
— then went to his Vienna office, now empty, and pieced together what the room
had been like.

“For the patient lying on the couch, surrounded by Persian carpets
and wreathed in the smoke of Freud’s cigar, the room was a late Victorian
fantasy of an opium den,” Fuss concluded.

Keller’s house, built especially for her, had been constructed with
wall-to-wall carpeting and a sophisticated heating and air-conditioning system,
both of which made the home especially inhospitable to someone who had neither
sight nor hearing and relied on vibrations and air circulation to orient
herself. “Keller and everyone around her were invested in showing that she
lived an ordinary, normal life, like anyone else,” Fuss said. “Unfortunately
the house was not conducive to the life that was lived there.”

Nurturing a love of literature

Fuss’ meticulous research for the book and her passion for her subject
matter exemplify her style as a scholar and teacher, according to her students.

“With her contagious energy and excitement about the course
material, she engages everyone in the classroom in the conversation,” said
Amanda Teo, a member of the class of 1999. “For the longest time, my
postgraduate plans involved law school, not graduate school. Professor Fuss
nurtured in me a lifetime love of literature and inspired me to continue my
literary studies beyond Princeton.” Teo is now pursuing her Ph.D. in English at
Harvard.

Fuss, who has been teaching at Princeton since 1988, received the
President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2001. She has taught
undergraduate courses on a range of topics in the areas of criticism and
theory, American literature, poetry, and gender and sexuality. At the graduate
level, she has taught seminars on the senses, the culture of death and
contemporary theory. Former students praise her ability to bring clarity to
complex material.

“When I worked as her teaching assistant for her ‘Introduction to
Theory’ class, I was incredibly impressed by the way she was able to
communicate difficult abstract material, including the work of Derrida,
Irigaray and Foucault, in a way that excited and inspired, rather than
alienated students,” said Karen Beckman, who earned a Ph.D. from Princeton’s
English department in 1999 and is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Assistant
Professor of Film Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “For me, Diana has
established the standard by which I judge my own performance as a teacher and a
scholar. I have a hard time meeting it — it’s a high one to match.”

Fuss currently is teaching a seminar that helps graduate students
generate their dissertation topics. In addition, she has been acting chair of
the English department since July. She relishes helping graduate students
formulate their research topics.

“There’s nothing better than vicariously living through other
people’s projects,” Fuss said.

Fuss lived through her own research for “The Sense of an Interior,”
in a way — when she was halfway through the book, a realization struck her: Her
own writing space was a slab of wood balancing on some rusting file cabinets,
perhaps not the most nurturing place to compose her work.

“I went out and bought an Art Deco desk that reputedly was owned by
a Hollywood mogul in the 1930s, in the hope that it would help me finish the
book,” Fuss recalled. “It did.”